It Takes a Village to Raise a Child: Digging Up Jessica McClure

So today at work I spent the day watching Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure. It was a made-for-TV movie ABC did, but I remember seeing it when I was way little on Lifetime. My mom was watching it, probably because she remembered the media circus of when Jessica fell down the well in ’86, being that we are also from Texas, even though the story eventually became worldwide news.

Anyway, this movie. This is a pretty riveting movie considering the majority of it is people standing around a hole.

The basic gist of the film (and the actual events) is this. Cissy McClure, 18, is looking after her and a few other kids at her sister’s house and the phone rings.

She leaves the kids in the backyard to go answer the phone real quick and when she returns, her baby Jessica is missing. The other kids are way helpful in this game of hide and seek though.

She screams a lot then calls the cops and then for the next 58 hours, the whole damn nation has to figure out how to get a baby out of a hole 8 inches across and anywhere from 80 to 100 feet deep.

It has a pretty large cast as the movie is about all the people who contributed to the rescue effort. Doctors and paramedics, mine workers and excavation experts, police and firefighters, and lots of others lending their tools, labor, and know-how.

At the end, everyone blows a collective load because they got the girl out of the well alive and there’s quick shots of all the people we come to know and their relief at the outcome of this ordeal.

Except the sister.

This all takes place at Cissy McClure’s sister Janie’s house, not her own. And at the end of the story she, who stood vigilantly by Cissy and her husband while they were more or less sequestered in the house and told to stay out of the way, is left alone. Solemnly, she stands by the well and the 29 foot shaft they dug parallel to it.

And mourns the loss of her previously shabby and a little sun-scorched, but otherwise nice yard.